About
I'm Muhammed Demirbaş, a software engineer living in Ankara, Türkiye. I'm married and we have two kids.
Work
I've been building software for fifteen years. My first job was at a healthcare startup, where we practically lived in the hospitals we were building for. Then came an R&D company doing network security, and after that a defence company. Then I spent six years at Atlassian; I went through acquisitions, office closures and layoffs there, and for much of that time I worked in a remote team. Most of that work was on the JVM, in Java, Kotlin and Spring, designing distributed systems and keeping them running.
At the end of 2023 I joined Huawei Big Data and changed fields: first the internals of Apache Spark, then Apache Iceberg. I wrote about why I made that switch. The project ended in September 2026, and my job there ended with it.
Since October 2026 I've been working independently. I'm looking for fully remote work, contract or full-time, on backend and distributed systems on the JVM as well as on data platforms built with Spark and Iceberg; I'm not taking office or hybrid roles. Working in English and with international teams is what I'm used to. I'm in Ankara, on UTC+3. If that sounds useful to you, write to [email protected].
Drone
In 2025 I bought a DJI Mini 5 Pro and crashed it three times in the first two months. My Turkish YouTube channel, Dronosfer, grew out of that. I talk about flying safely, camera settings, range tests and the rules in Türkiye, and I film places around Ankara from above.
Family
Ailece Ankara is our family's guide to Ankara for people with kids. Since 2019 we have been writing about the cafés, parks, day trips and events we go to, on the website and on Instagram.
Writing
I've been writing here since 2023, about clean code, my switch to big data and the tools I build. I write the posts in English; the Turkish versions are machine translations unless marked otherwise.